No Flash for the iPhone

So Flash isn’t good enough for the iPhone.Â Not having a rich client on the iPhone is nonsensical so Steve must have a flash-like play up his sleeve. Perhaps Microsoft and Apple are cooking up a little SilverLight pie?

Microsoft need a serious partner to put SilverLight on the “its not a Windows only play” route. Steve hates giving license fees to Adobe and would prefer to have his own solution. So barring that the best spoiling play is to get into bed with Microsoft. Who knows what deal he could get from Microsoft on the back of that bet, better support for Microsoft Office on the Mac, or even access to the Bejing Olympics for Apple technology…

I’m not looking for another vague phrase like “richer interaction characteristics”. I’m interested in what exactly you think is missing from the iphone web browser (and the open web in general) that would be solved by adding Flash or Silverlight. Faster code?

I’ve seen a bunch of people advocating these proprietary frameworks as if they’re “the web done right” and I’m trying to understand why. The fact is, developing for the web is hard mainly because the web is based on open standards. What’s great about this is it allows multiple implementers to create browsers on an even footing. The problem is that inevitably they don’t implement or innovate in lockstep, and don’t implement each other’s bugs perfectly either. If Abobe or Flash were to allow other people to implement their standards then those platforms would have exactly the same problems. Unless you want Adobe or Microsoft to have control over the web platform, how do you see them as long-term viable options?

Sure, I agree with that. Flash is definitely ubiquitous enough to make its absence annoying. It’s just that your original suggestion, that either they’ll port Silverlight or come up with a Cocoa Web Plugin or something, doesn’t solve that. Given that they already have Quicktime, Canvas, SVG and the rest of Webkit’s entourage, I don’t see that they really need to bring in a big monolithic platform like that. It seems like they’d be better off improving the development environment for those technologies instead.